Our tread-mill versifiers will shrink and mumble in the presence of Mr. Fletcher’s clean new poetry. They who have inherited the dead mottled skin of old poetic form with its incrustation of ancient allusions, symbols, and yellowed figures, will not feel the alluring freshness of a poem such as this:
It is evening, and the earth
Wraps her shoulders in an old blue shawl.
Afar there clink the polychrome points of the stars,
Indefatigable after all these years!
Here upon earth there is life, and then death,
Dawn, and later nightfall,
Fire, and the quenching of embers:
But why should I not remember that my night is dawn in another part of the world,
If the idea fits my fancy?